A new version of the Scarab ransomware is now being distributed via the Necurs botnet

The Scarab ransomware is now being distributed to millions of users via a massive spam campaign powered with the dreaded Necurs botnet.

Scarab is a strain of ransomware, first spotted in June by the security researcher Michael Gillespie, that is now being distributed to millions of users via a massive spam campaign powered with the dreaded Necurs botnet.

Security researchers believe that Necurs botnet was rented by a threat actor to spread the Scarab ransomware.

The ongoing spam campaign started on concurrently the Thanksgiving, most of the experts in the security community reporting the ongoing spam campaign, including security firms F-Secure and Forcepoint,

Forcepoint experts highlighted huge volume of spam emails sent in a few hours, 12.5 million emails.

“Forcepoint Security Labs have observed another piece of ransomware called “Scarab” being pushed by the infamous Necurs botnet. The massive email campaign started at approximately 07:30 UTC and is active as of 13:30 today, totalling over 12.5 million emails captured so far.” reads the analysis published by Forcepoint.

“Necurs’ spam botnet business is doing well as it is seemingly acquiring new customers. The Necurs botnet is the biggest deliverer of spam with 5 to 6 million infected hosts online monthly, and is responsible for the biggest single malware spam campaigns. Its service model provides the whole infection chain: from spam emails with malicious malware downloader attachments, to hosting the payloads on compromised websites.” reported F-Secure.

“The final payload (to our surprise) was Scarab ransomware, which we haven’t seen previously delivered in massive spam campaigns. Scarab ransomware is a relatively new ransomware variant first observed last June, and its code is based on the open source “ransomwareproof-of-concept” called HiddenTear.”

The Necurs botnet pushed tens of millions of spam emails of the Scarab ransomware.

According to Forcepoint, by noon, Necurs had already sent out 12.5 million emails carrying what appeared to be a new version of the Scarab ransomware.

Necurs spam volume pushing Scarab ransomware

The massive Scarab ransomware campaign is evident also from data from the ID-Ransomware service that allows users to detect the type of ransomware that infected their system. The following graph shows the number of submissions for the Scarab ransomware per day.

Scarab emails disguised as archives carrying scanned images, email subjects are chose to trick victims into opening the archive, some of the most popular subject lines used in the campaign were:

Scanned from Lexmark Scanned from HP Scanned from Canon Scanned from Epson

These emails carried a 7Zip archive that contained a Visual Basic script that act as a dropper of the Scarab ransomware.

Researchers observed that this Visual Basic script contained the same Game of Thrones references that were observed in other Necurs campaigns that delivered the Locky ransomware in September.

A first variant of the Scarab ransomware was discovered in June, in July the Malwarebytes researcher Marcelo Rivera spotted a second version that used the “.scorpio” extension.

The variant currently used by crooks appends the “.[suupport@protonmail.com].scarab” extension to the original filenames of encrypted files.

The Scarab ransomware deletes shadow volume copies to make impossible to recovery the files, the malware drops a ransom note named “IF YOU WANT TO GET ALL YOUR FILES BACK, PLEASE READ THIS.TXT” on victims’ PCs.

The ransom does refer the ransom sum to pay, but urges victims to contact the Scarab authors via email or BitMessage as soon as possible to pay the smaller the ransom sum.

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Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer.
Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US.
Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines.
Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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